Long, long day. Really long. I spent it with my mother, an experience that always exhausts me. Age has sucked everything but the life out of her. There’s no vestige anymore of the person she once was. That saddens me, even though I know it’s the way of things. A day spent with her is no longer a day with Mom, which used to be my delight, but is, instead, a day spent with a very frail, very slow, somewhat confused, usually grumpy, very passive-aggressive, lovingly narcissistic, obsessive compulsive person.

I don’t regret the time. I still love the person she was, so I care deeply for the person she is, but I always arrive home completely drained. It takes energy for me to slow down to her speed (which is the same reason I never enjoyed toddlers) and it takes even more energy for me to deal with her relentless negativity and to track, and respond appropriately to, her often obscure conversation. I’m a grumpy person myself, so I’ve told both the kids to kick me in the tuchus if, when I’m old, I whine endlessly. I’ve told them to feel free to threaten me with their absence if I don’t clean up (or cheer up) my act.

Thankfully, I’ve now had a couple of hours to decompress. My husband took my daughter and her friends to the movies, the dogs are washed and resting nearby, and the mouse is making music on its creaky little wheel. Everything is peaceful. I like peaceful, since it gives my brain freedom. And with that mental freedom comes the urge to share my thoughts. Here goes:

***

The new Nazi salute rises in Europe. Its practitioners say it’s a joke, because they angle their stiff arm downwards, not upwards. Their claim that it’s a joke is a lie, of course. They pair this neo-Nazi salute with the same venomous anti-Semitism that led the Nazis to create the gas chambers. Also, it’s very bizarre to see black men do this salute, since the Nazis believed firmly in black racial inferiority Hitler, as many recall, was livid when Jesse Owens swept the races during the 1936 Munich Olympics. How dare he prove false one of the Nazi’s racial theories.

***

Andrew McCarthy has penned one of his best posts. In addition to shredding the purported facts in the now-infamous New York Times whitewash of Benghazi history (which I won’t dignify with a link), McCarthy zeroes in on the real purpose behind the story — and it’s not just to salvage Hillary’s reputation:

[T]he objective of Kirkpatrick’s novella is not to persuade; it is to shrink the parameters of newsworthy inquiry to a punctilious debate over nonsense: The cockamamie trailer and the dizzying jihadist org chart.

[snip]

Coherence and historical accuracy are not what the Times is after. The aim is to drag our consideration of a jihadist act of war down a rabbit hole of nitpicking over which jihadists did what. Meanwhile, the Obama administration’s derelictions before, during, and after the massacre — the matter of greatest consequence — remain studiously outside this wearying crossfire.

Remember, the Times-Clinton tag team has run this play before. Start with a president using a young intern to turn the Oval Office into a brothel and then perjuring himself over it. Ought to be a removable offense, right? But the next thing you know, after some epic media investigation dictated by Democratic talking points, we find ourselves kvetching over whether it was really sex; whether she was of consenting age; whether he really lied; whether the lies were really “material”; whether a president’s Oval Office trysts are really part of his “private life”; and “what the definition of ‘is’ is.”

See? None of the ever tinier questions or answers matter. The idea is to exhaust the American attention span until enough people are persuaded that it’s time to — all together now — move on.

McCarthy ends his post with dozens of the big questions, the ones that need to be asked. The tragedy of those questions, a tragedy in many ways greater even than those four lonely, violent deaths in Benghazi, is that no one will ever ask them. The media surrounding Obama and Hillary doesn’t want to know the answer to those questions, and Obama and Hillary will be careful to avoid every coming into contact with the people willing to ask them.

***

Caroline Glick sees a silver lining to that same New York Times article. She believes that the Times, while trying to whitewash Obama and Hillary, accidentally admitted an important truth: Radical Islam, which is a worldwide phenomenon made up of many groups and individuals, is the problem. Al Qaeda is just one tiny drop in the Islamist ocean. This reality runs counter to Obama’s own narrative.

Since bin Laden’s death, as you know, Obama has been boasting that al Qaeda is dead, meaning that America no longer need fear massive terrorist attacks or global warfare. With that fiction in place, Obama has felt free to pal around with Iran, the Taliban, the Turkish government, etc. The New York Times just blew that fiction to smithereens. Either al Qaeda was the main actor in Benghazi, which means that Obama lied when he said it was defeated, dropped the ball in Benghazi, and lied after the fact; or al Qaeda didn’t commit the Benghazi massacre, which means that Obama lied when he said al Qaeda was the only Islamic enemy, and that he’s been exposing America to terrible danger by refusing to acknowledge terrorists other than al Qaeda.

I agree with Glick in principle, but believe that only a small subset of Americans will appreciate these subtleties. Either they support Obama and Hillary or they don’t. Nothing else matters.

And speaking of the travesty that is modern academia, if you can get behind the Wall Street Journal’s paywall, please check out Heather MacDonald’s masterful exposure of the rot at the heart of UCLA’s English literature department. Shakespeare is out and now English majors must take “a total of three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; genre studies, interdisciplinary studies, and critical theory; or creative writing.”

It sure sounds as if the English Lit department has been transformed into the Marxist Social Issues department. The students will learn how not to think. Well, they’re actually learning how not to think in every department at every major American university. (In years past, I might have excluded the sciences from that blanket statement, but the sciences’ impassioned embrace of the global warming hoax reveals that academia is tainted in toto.) Worse, these English majors will never learn learn about the beauty of their mother tongue nor will they be exposed to big ideas about human kind. Instead, their prose, and the thoughts underlying that prose, will be like this:

At its most intimate, colonization involves bodies, altering how subjects experience and conceive of desire, hunger, touch, comfort, pleasure, and pain. This panel seeks participants from all disciplines engaged with the objects of early American studies to contribute to a discussion of method and theory for understanding early American carnality. In particular, it is concerned with the intersection of bodily sensation with evolving understandings of empire, nation, encounter, and resistance. How was colonization effected through and affected by sensation? How do theories of affect and intimacy impact current early American historiographies, and vice versa? How might Americanists reconceptualize our understandings of the significance of empire and colonization through attentiveness to early American sensation? Proposals that consider race, gender, and/or sexuality dynamically or that explore economic status, religion, local conditions, or ethno-cultural identities as part of carnality strongly encouraged (though naming some themes is not meant to exclude other possibilities).

Each panelist will present a 10 minute paper and be paired with a respondent who will provide prepared comments. Respondents will ideally be non-early Americanists in order to foster temporal interdisciplinarity.

Mr. Bookworm doesn’t understand why I’m resistant to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to send my children to big name colleges. It’s not just that they’re rife with antisemitism and anti-Americanism. It’s because major universities such as UCLA are neutering and Marx-icizing their English departments, meaning that the universities’ ultimate goal is for America’s “best and brightest” (or at least, her “A” and “B” students) to be taught to think and write in the way of American academics.

***

Everything you need to know about the Obama administration: It frees from prison Lynne Stewart, an unrepentant Communist who actively aided Islamist terrorism against the US, even as it gets ever-more-deeply involved in a down and dirty fight with nuns who refuse to let the government force them to violate their religious conscience. My money is on the nuns. Obama may have a rigid ideology on his side, but the nuns are members of God’s army, and they will not give up the fight. Fortunately, the Archdiocese of New York is not playing nice but is, instead, telling the world exactly what the Obama administration is doing — and what it’s doing is discriminating against traditional religion.

***

Mary Tudor (1516-1558) lost Calais, the last English outpost in France. She found that loss so horrifying that she said, “When I am dead and opened, you shall find `Calais’ lying in my heart.” Barack Obama has lost Fallujah, the city that American troops, especially Marines, bled and died for, probably in greater numbers than in any other geographic site in our decade long battle against Islamists in Iraq and Afghanistan. He hasn’t said a single word about this terrible loss, nor does he seem to care that he’s allowed ten years of hard-fought military victories to vanish in the blink of an eye. When Obama dies and is opened, not only will no one find ‘Fallujah’ lying in his heart, no one will find a heart.

***

Tom Blumer details the five myths people have to believe in order to accept the Obama presidency as anything other than a disaster. Two involve the economy, one involves Obamacare, one involves climate change, and the last is about national security. 2014 may well be the death of all these myths, but we’ll still be saddled with two more years of Obama.

***

The Democrat party used to have genuine liberals in its numbers — people with a broad, classic education who envisioned a world that was better with America, not a world better off without America. They may have been useful idiots who were unaware that they represented the pretty front of hardcore Leftism, but they were real.

These old-time liberal Democrats were the people who believed in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. They believed that men and women were different (and viva la difference), but that women were entitled to equal treatment under the law. They would have scoffed at the notion that men, and all their biological impulses, are dangerous and perverse, and should therefore be destroyed. They believed wholeheartedly that blacks were their brothers and sisters, and deserved full standing under the law. They would have been shocked to hear that the blacks were to be treated economically as marginally intelligent infants and sexually as uncontrolled adolescents. That’s how the KKK and Jim Crow viewed blacks, and true liberal Democrats fought against those demeaning stereotypes.

Old-time liberal Democrats believed that Israel was a feisty nation, rooted in the Bible, burnished in the terrible crucible of the Holocaust, and to be applauded for fighting against the forces of Communist and Arabist darkness. They would have been unable to comprehend a world in which their party mouthpieces bellowed loudly that Jews are the new Nazis, simply because they are trying to protect their whole country and their individual citizens from being overrun by genocidal, anti-Christian, misogynistic, homophobic, medieval minds.

I’ve been thinking today about unmatched combatants and a combatant’s willingness to take hits in order to win a fight. I think about the former often because, when I do jujitsu, I am an unmatched combatant. I’m usually the only woman in the adult classes, which means that the people (i.e., men) with whom I’m rolling are 8 to 14 inches taller than I am, and outweigh me by 40 to 90 pounds.

Interestingly, these men, all of whom are nice, thoughtful people, are more scared of me than I am scared of them. When we face each other before rolling, I look them in the eye and say, “Remember to give only about 50%” and, with those words, some of them just collapse in front of me. They are so afraid that any move they do will hurt me that they do nothing at all. Instead, they just kind of lie there, which isn’t fun for me or for them. It’s only the strongest black belts who have sufficient control to give me a run for my money without hurting me. I optimistically assume that the black belts have some fun with this careful grappling, because they get to focus on skill, rather than strength.

I had the same experience of being an unmatched combatant back in the day when I used to play tag football. My specialty was sacking the quarterback. After the snap, I’d just charge him. (It was always a him.) Invariably, the quarterback in these informal games would react as if a mosquito was attacking him — he’d back off quickly. Had I been bigger, I know he would have gone forward, because he wouldn’t have worried about hurting me. As it was, seeing me buzz around, the guy’s instinct (and this was true for whichever guy was quarterback) was to retreat, not attack.

Interestingly, I’m also an unmatched combatant when I end up in a class with teenagers — boys or girls — who are much closer to me in weight and overall size. While the grown men are over-controlled, the teenagers are under-controlled, especially the girls. I’m strong, agile and reasonably skilled, but I also have the slowness and slight rigidity of someone several decades older than these teenagers. These kids don’t understand slow, their joints feel no pain, and they have cat-like flexibility. I’m much more frightened of a 110 pound 15-year old girl than I am of a 180 pound 40-year old man.

There’s actually a point to these ruminations about unmatched combatants. In the examples I’m giving, I am talking about sports combat. People want to win, but they want to have fun, and it’s no fun when you hurt your friends. Even the teenagers don’t want to hurt me. They just have a very limited understanding of what will hurt me.

Problems arise when foolish people (by which I mean Lefties) try to apply the rules of sportsmanship to war. War is not about winning for fun, it’s just about winning. The fact that a war may be asymmetrical doesn’t mean that the larger power has to handicap itself to give the other side a fair chance. Certainly, the winning side shouldn’t engage in sadistic massacres, but that’s not because sadism and overkill are unsportsmanlike. It’s because they are (a) an unnecessary waste of resources and (b) morally bad for the bigger army.

After adjusting for necessary force and moral decency, the bigger army should do whatever is necessary to win, and it should do so without regard to the other side’s weaknesses. When Lord Wellington reputedly said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, he wasn’t talking about fair play. He was talking about the brutal field sports public school students used to play, in which no quarter was asked or given.

Part of this willingness to do whatever it takes to win in true combat means a willingness to take the hit. One of my favorite mil bloggers, America’s 1st Sergeant, wrote a wonderful post about dealing with bullies, a necessary life lesson for him because his father’s military career meant that, as a boy, Am’s 1st Sgt, was repeatedly tested by the bullies at a series of new schools. He learned, very quickly, that you’re going to get hurt taking on the bullies, but you’ll get hurt worse if you immediately acquiesce. Bullies do not believe in sportsmanship. Or, if they do, the only sports that interest them are blood sports — with you being the one who bleeds.

What the Leftists conveniently ignore or forget is that it’s not size, but intention, that makes the bully. They believe that because America is the biggest force, it is the bullying-est force, and that it must yield to smaller forces in asymmetrical warfare. That Americans fight to win in a legitimate defensive war against a culture dedicated to world conquest, and do not fight simply to destroy, torture or convert, is a subtlety that eludes the Leftist elites, who root for the smaller, more brutal Al Qaeda or Taliban forces. At the same time, the Leftists cannot stomach the fact that our troops, recognizing the nature of a fight with a bully, are willing to engage, even if it means taking very painful hits, because that’s the only way to win.

Leftists are bullies, that goes without saying. But the American elite believe in a bloodless bullying that involves hectoring, embarrassing, humiliating and disempowering those who are ready, willing and able to take the real fight to the real enemy. It’s rather sad that the Leftists reserve their savagery for their first defenders, while demanding that these same defenders hew to completely irrelevant rules of sportsmanship that have no place on the field of battle.

I’ve always wondered what I’d do if I ever found myself in a dire emergency. I haven’t been tested, so my guesses range from total collapsing to being somewhat useful. Gunnery Sgt. Ralph Scott doesn’t have to guess. In Fallujah, he proved that, when he is under fire, he acts with the highest degree of bravery, honor and altruism and — he’s now getting a well-deserved reward for that.

UPDATE: Gunnery Sgt. Scott wasn’t only brave, he was lucky, since he survived his heroic acts. This is the story of a legendary British bomb disposal expert, a man who saved countless lives, whose timing was up on his very last day in the field. So sad.